Amidst the increasing clamour for a discourse on educational improvement, on budgetary allocations and retention rates, there is one crucial question which is insufficiently discussed. And the question is this: what is the purpose of education today? All over the past 100 years, that question has been asked often. In colonial India, the official answer would have been, “to create a cadre of clerks and officials to run the colonial state”; while in a newly decolonized India, the official answer could be, “to create a national sensibility and the national citizen.” Today, I suspect the official answer to the question about the purpose of education would be, “to give people jobs.” Increasingly, the emphasis in education is towards vocationalist and skills development. In a recent private conversation, the education minister of a North Indian state said, “we have a list of jobs. We just don’t have the people skilled enough to do them. We need bio-technologists, fitters, crane operators and lab assistants. But our education does not prepare young people for what we need. We need to change that.” Similarly, we find that the Confederation of Indian Industry is showing increasing interest in school education. The CII recently commissioned a study to look at the challenges and opportunities which face the Indian industry and this is its thesis that in the year 2025, there will be about 40 million jobs worldwide, which need to be filled. India will be one of the few countries in the world to have a labour surplus of the right age group. It therefore believes that we need to think about the kinds of education system necessary to develop skills whereby our children will be best equipped to function in this scenario.
Public consensus on the way to improve educational access is increasingly moving towards a public-private partnership. But we must be concerned about the terrible narrowness of the vision for educational improvement which characterizes our discourse. Education, in this picture, is about the implanting of useful skills– the assumption being that it will ultimately lead to both personal and national enrichment but as Martha Nussbaum writes, education is not only a producer of wealth; it is a producer of citizens. Citizens in a democracy need, above all, freedom of mind– to learn to ask searching questions; to reject shoddy historical arguments; to imagine alternative possibilities from a globalizing, service and market-driven economy; to think what it might be like to be in others’ shoes. Recently, the Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, spoke about the importance of reading novels as what he calls an antidote to hate. He said, “I believe in literature as a bridge between people. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be a better person. Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other—really imagine each other; the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much sameness, too much certainty.”
The skills and thought processes which generate the curiosity, the imagining are associated with the humanities, the arts and history but they are given little or no importance in the NCERT’s new textbooks for History and Political Science, where they are terribly neglected. Our dominant conception of worthwhile education is increasingly technical and mechanical. The thinking processes employed in the social sciences are today seen as quaint, vaguely lefty-intellectual, a kind of quixotic idealism– which has very little to do with the real business of life. It is a strange thought when we see the vision of Gandhi, Tagore and Aurobindo, where the tragedy lies for people who wish to assert a more holistic vision.